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Soon after the launch of the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro in June, we pointed to an analysis by AnandTech showing how the need to drive a massive number of pixels taxed the graphics capabilities of the machine to the point where it struggled to hit 20 frames per second while scrolling on resource-intensive web pages such as Facebook news feeds.

I grabbed a build (r135516 - it's no longer the latest build but I assume the later builds also contain the fix) and tried it out on the 13-inch rMBP. Scrolling down my Facebook news feed ended up being one of the best showcases for poor scrolling performance on the rMBPs, so that's obviously the first test I ran. As always I used Quartz Debug to measure UI frame rate.

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The results show frame rates of around 20 frames per second (fps) under the standard Safari 6.0.2, but jump to nearly 50 fps when using nightly build r135516 of WebKit.

AnandTech hasn't been able to determine exactly what code changes were made to enable the significant boost to scrolling performance on Retina MacBook Pro models, and it is unclear exactly when those changes will be incorporated into Safari itself, but it certainly seems that a solution is on its way.

macrumors regular

Great, that was the major concern I had that was holding me from purchase a new macbook pro: Poor web browsing performance. Kudos to Apple, for working on optimising the code rather than trying to sell another model with faster processor in just a few months. I am so glad they managed to address this as it was rather irritating...

macrumors 68030

It's a shame so many "trusted" review sites (including The Verge) dinged the rMBP and blamed the hardware.... for what is clearly a software problem.

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This isn't the only area where lag is found. There is general UI lag in the OS as well. Not to say that there isn't some software issues there as well, but they have a lot of evidence that GPUs just aren't up to snuff yet.

Edit: Why haven't I downloaded nightly builds before? This fixed multiple issues I had been having with Safari.

macrumors newbie

macrumors newbie

This isn't the only area where lag is found. There is general UI lag in the OS as well. Not to say that there isn't some software issues there as well, but they have a lot of evidence that GPUs just aren't up to snuff yet.

Edit: Why haven't I downloaded nightly builds before? This fixed multiple issues I had been having with Safari.

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I haven't noticed anything besides the scrolling, then again my previous MBP probably had some lag because it was quite old. Which instances can you detect the UI lag?

The scrolling lag is completely gone with the new Webkit build by the way.

macrumors 68030

Great, that was the major concern I had that was holding me from purchase a new macbook pro: Poor web browsing performance. Kudos to Apple, for working on optimising the code rather than trying to sell another model with faster processor in just a few months. I am so glad they managed to address this as it was rather irritating...

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Apple didn't do anything, webkit did which is mostly people from KHTML which is what webkit was forked from.

macrumors 6502a

This isn't the only area where lag is found. There is general UI lag in the OS as well. Not to say that there isn't some software issues there as well, but they have a lot of evidence that GPUs just aren't up to snuff yet.

Edit: Why haven't I downloaded nightly builds before? This fixed multiple issues I had been having with Safari.

Click to expand...

The issue with the nightlies is they're highly unreliable. Every now and then an update comes in that makes it crash all day, introduce rendering errors, etc. It's meant for testing and nothing else. Only a fraction of the changes in the nightly actually gets into release WebKit.

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